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Lean Leadership for Healthcare Approaches to Lean
Transformation 1st Edition Ronald G. Bercaw Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Ronald G. Bercaw
ISBN(s): 9781466515543, 1466515546
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 4.14 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
Lean Leadership
for Healthcare
Approaches
to Lean
Transformation

Ronald G. Bercaw
Foreword by John P. Poole, SVP, ThedaCare Improvement System
Lean Leadership
for Healthcare
Approaches
to Lean
Transformation
Lean Leadership
for Healthcare
Approaches
to Lean
Transformation

Ronald G. Bercaw
Foreword by
John P. Poole, SVP, ThedaCare Improvement System
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
© 2013 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business

No claim to original U.S. Government works

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Contents

Foreword.................................................................................................... ix
Preface........................................................................................................ xi
Acknowledgments......................................................................................xv
About the Author.....................................................................................xvii
1 Lean at a Glance................................................................................. 1
What Is Lean Healthcare?........................................................................ 1
Value-Added............................................................................................ 1
Nonvalue-Added...................................................................................... 2
First Theme of Lean Improvement: Continuous Improvement................ 5
Second Theme of Lean Improvement: Respect for All People.................. 6
Seven Wastes............................................................................................ 7
Overproduction.............................................................................. 7
Waiting........................................................................................... 8
Overprocessing............................................................................... 9
Inventory........................................................................................ 9
Motion......................................................................................... 10
Defects......................................................................................... 11
Transportation.............................................................................. 11
Two Additional Wastes.......................................................................... 12
Unused Human Capital................................................................ 13
Waste of Organizational Design................................................... 14
Principles of Improvement..................................................................... 15
Flow.............................................................................................. 15
Pull............................................................................................... 17
Defect-Free................................................................................... 18
Visual Management...................................................................... 19
Kaizen..........................................................................................22

v
© 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
vi ◾ Contents

Lean Healthcare Defined....................................................................... 23

Summary: Key Points from Chapter 1................................................... 25
2 Creating and Deploying a Lean Strategy......................................... 27
Creating a Culture of Improvement....................................................... 27
Seven-Phase Policy Deployment Process................................................30
Step 1: Establish the Organizational Vision..................................30
Step 2: Develop Three- to Five-Year Breakthrough Objectives...... 31
True North Measures.......................................................... 31
Step 3: Develop the Annual Breakthrough Objectives and
Improvement Priorities................................................................. 36
Identify Top-Level Improvement Priorities.......................... 37
Selecting the Top-Level Improvement Priorities.................. 38
Step 4: Deploy the Improvement Priorities...................................40
Step 5: Implement the Improvement Priorities..............................43
Use a Value Stream Approach to Improvement....................43
Lean Tools........................................................................... 49
Kaizen................................................................................. 52
Step 6: Monthly Review............................................................... 57
Step 7: Annual Review..................................................................60
Enablers of Hoshin Kanri...................................................................... 61
World-Class Targets for Improvement...................................................66
Summary: Key Points from Chapter 2................................................... 69

3 Leading Change—The Transformation Roadmap—Phase 1:

“Get Ready”..................................................................................... 71
Beginning the Journey........................................................................... 71
Phase I: Preparing to Transform (Get Ready)—Building
the Infrastructure................................................................................... 73
Selecting Your Change Agent....................................................... 74
Get Informed................................................................................77
Get Help....................................................................................... 82
Establish a Steering Committee....................................................84
Train Your Internal Experts.......................................................... 87
Develop and Deploy a Communication Campaign...................... 89
Summary: Key Points from Chapter 3................................................... 92

4 The Transformation Roadmap—Phase 2: The Acceleration

Phase (Improve, Sustain, and Spread).............................................. 95
Delivering on Preparation Efforts.......................................................... 95
Step 1: Ensure You Have Selected the Right Value
Streams on Which to Focus.......................................................... 98

© 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

 Contents ◾ vii

Step 2: Establish Value Stream Governance and Set Up

Your Value Stream Performance System..................................... 100
Step 3: Utilize A-3 Thinking to Realize Improvement................ 103
Step 4: Sustain the Improvements and Manage Visually............. 104
5S: A Beginning Place for Visual Management
of Process........................................................................105
Using Visual Management for Process Control................. 109
Using Visual Management for Improving Results:
Managing for Daily Improvement......................................115
Control Systems for Visual Management........................... 118
Peer Task Audits (Kamishibai).......................................... 123
Step 5: Capture the Savings........................................................ 127
Step 6: Support Your Change with Ongoing Training
and Coaching............................................................................. 131
Lean Coaching.................................................................. 131
Step 7: Spread Lean Thinking across the Organization............... 135
Replication of Artifacts, Products, Solutions,
and Process.................................................................... 136
Adding Additional Value Streams...................................... 139
Summary: Key Points from Chapter 4................................................. 141

5 The Transformation Road Map—Phase 3:

Make Organizational Improvement the “New” Culture................ 143
Changing to the New Organizational Structure.................................. 143
Lean Capacity Building....................................................................... 146
Lean Information Technology............................................................. 147
Lean Finance........................................................................................151
Lean Human Resources....................................................................... 153
Lean Supply Chain.............................................................................. 158
Lean Project Management, Lean Construction, and
Lean New Service Introduction........................................................... 161
Lean Leadership Processes................................................................... 168
Medical Leadership Processes.............................................................. 171
Taking Lean beyond Your Four Walls................................................. 174
Summary: Key Points from Chapter 5................................................. 177

6 Leadership Behaviors and Actions for Success............................... 179

Leading by Example............................................................................ 179
Participate............................................................................................ 182
Learn the Tools.................................................................................... 183
Rotate Teaching of the Core Lean Tools..................................... 184

© 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

viii ◾ Contents

Book of the Month Club............................................................ 184

Become a Lean Facilitator........................................................... 184
Walk the Value Streams....................................................................... 185
Commit the Resources to Be Successful.............................................. 186
Facilitation.................................................................................. 186
Team Resources................................................................. 188
Middle Management Expectations.................................... 188
Supplies............................................................................. 188
External Resources............................................................ 189
Hold People Accountable..................................................................... 189
Address Antibodies.............................................................................. 192
Redeployment versus Unemployment.................................................. 193
Monitor and Demand Results.............................................................. 196
Believe................................................................................................. 196
Summary: Key Points from Chapter 6................................................. 196
7 Mitigating Transformation Risk and Avoiding
Common Mistakes......................................................................... 199
Being Successful and Avoiding Failure................................................. 199
Don’t Waste the First Six to Nine Months........................................... 202
Managing the Breadth and Depth of the Change................................204
Leadership, Management, Support Staff, and Medical Staff
Engagement.........................................................................................208
Inability to Operate Two Systems............................................... 210
Common Errors to Organizational Change Efforts............................. 211
Summary: Key Points from Chapter 7................................................. 214
8 Closing Thoughts........................................................................... 215

Glossary of Lean Terms........................................................................... 219

© 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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passing spasm, we should not learn and reason that it was you. The
spasm was realism and fact, but it was peculiar and individual; it
was not you whom we have known and generalized from
experience. In such a case, Aristotle says shrewdly, we might get
artistic pleasure from the workmanship or colors, that is, from the
medium and the mechanics of art, but we should have no artistic
pleasure from the soul and substance of the art product because the
product found no prototype in our experience, because we could not
define it or generalize it. Art selects. It cannot give everything, and if
it would be true, it must give what all may understand; it must give
what is generally true, and what is generally true of all men is
human nature.
Selective idealism has usually the advantage of being intelligible,
but it labors under the disadvantage of becoming merely intelligible.
It gives the truth, but through familiarity the beauty or artistic
appeal of the truth has been dulled and tarnished, or, like the
dandelion, until a Lowell gives it a new luster, its very commonness
leaves us unmoved. We enjoy human nature in Homer because he
was the creator of sleeping winds and of rosy-fingered dawns and of
the mother’s smile alight through tears. A modern who would
transfer these same touches to his own composition would leave us
cold. He too must create; he must be personal, but he must not be
individual. Personality is the knowing and loving principle, and looks
to the many with its thoughts and wishes. Individuality is the
principle of separation and isolation and is looking inward, not
outward. When the artist, therefore, creates and gives his own winds
or dawn or mother love, he should speak to us in his own concrete
embodiments of nature, and of human nature, using a language
man understands. If selective idealism tends to become merely
intelligible and unappealing, individualism tends to become
unintelligible and to mystify.
The poet, the novelist, the painter have more depth than silver
nitrate on a photographic plate. Artists do not simply mirror nature;
they do not catch at the odd or freakish. That is photography, not
creation. Horace did not give us a moving picture of a falling tree,
but he saw the humor and human interest of that “sorry log.” Burns
did not give us an anatomical study of the typhus-carrier on a lady’s
bonnet in a kirk, making it crawl upon ourselves and sending us
after the kerosene can and bath tub, but Burns soared away, from
that sight with Horatian humor and Horatian human nature, into the
immortal lines, “O wad some power the giftie gie us.” The artist who
confounds the generalized mental attractiveness found in true art
with the shock of nerves or the tickling of concupiscence or with
misguided realism, will not produce things of beauty. He gets a thrill,
but it is not the permanent, undying thrill of art, not the thing of
beauty, which is a joy forever.
 IV
ART AND HUMAN NATURE

2. REALISM AND REALITY

At an exhibition in New York City there was displayed a picture of

an ocean wave upon the crest of which the artist had nailed a real
bar of soap. The first idea of the spectator was to consider this
peculiar product an advertisement, but it seems to have been
intended as a serious, if perverted, attempt at art. If the artist was
not slyly proposing the caricature of excessive realism, the cake of
soap will serve well as a parable for those artists who do not
distinguish between realism and reality.
The ultra-realist forgets that art is a creation, the making of
another world. The artist cannot really create what he puts into his
new world of sight or hearing or imagination, of color, of sound, of
words. If he could actually make something new, not based on
nature or on human nature, he would do so on the penalty of being
unintelligible. Neither should he go to the other extreme and not
leave the world of reality at all. He may not eat his cake and have it.
If what he takes from actuality is not merged fully into his art form,
he tries to give us fact and fiction, history and art, in the same
product, and he nails a piece of soap on a painted wave.
Aristotle insists above all on probability in art, or motivation, as it
is now commonly called. A probable or well-motived impossibility, he
says, is more artistic and pleasing than an improbable, that is, an
unmotived fact. For a like reason he demands that fiction be more
philosophical than history. We accept a chronicle of facts without
necessarily being aware of their causal connections. In the realms of
art the connection must be established. This principle, so fruitful for
art, is not to be understood as justifying or approving that school of
subjective novelists which is parsimonious in happenings but diffuse
in reasoning and gives us a maximum of discussion with a minimum
of incident. Aristotle is thinking more of the people who witness the
drama. The spectators want the motivation and plausibility of action
rather than that of logic. The soliloquy has gone from the stage; the
printed soliloquy should be curtailed in the novel. A true
understanding of motivation will send all artists back to nature and
to human nature for those incidents which are the springs of action
and do not require lengthy logic to labor at their explanation. Homer
is completely lacking in logical refining. Incident leads to feeling and
talk, which gives rise to further incident. Action, feeling and
character, Aristotle’s trinity of art subjects, are mingled and detailed,
and the story moves on in a way plausible and pleasing to Homeric
audiences. When Homer runs short of motivation, he does not resort
to logic; he refers the causality to the gods, as modern writers refer
all insoluble problems to evolution, which puts hardly more
restrictions upon imagination than Homeric mythology.
The artist must transfer his product wholly to the world of art.
Sculptured horses must not neigh, nor painted flowers give perfume,
but neighing and scents may be suggested even in stone, and in
lines by art happenings, which all may read running if the artist will
use the language of human nature. He should paint his cake of soap
in, not nail it on. If the exigencies of the story demand it, costumes
of the night or costumes of bathing may be in place, but it is nailing
on a cake of soap, it is outraging probabilities, to force a story into a
setting or to adopt a style of dress or of undress simply for the sake
of producing a shock. That is the shock of reality, not of art and
beauty. Should the dramatist have an excellent quartet and stop the
play in order to give a song, he is nailing on a piece of soap, which
may be magnificent soap, but it is not art.
Why is the so-called realism depressing? Why is the Russian
novelist left for the connoisseur but is caviar to the general? Is it the
presence or absence of evil? Hardly that. Homer’s stories are full of
evil and of death; Sophocles’ King Œdipus and the Prometheus of
Eschylus are surcharged with evil, but they do not depress.
Euripides, on the other hand, and Lucian have more alleged realism
and are depressing, even when they cause a smile. The realist is
cynical, and cynics do not soar off into the world of art, but keep
tethering themselves to the real world. They do not lose themselves
in their story because they are always thinking of keeping some
one’s nose against their grindstone. Why should the optimistic
moralizing of Polyanna be resented by critics any more than the
cynic moralizing of Shaw or of Main Street? The cheerful idiot and
the purblind dyspeptic are depressing in real life, especially when
they are moralizing, but in and out of art we can laugh at the idiot,
while we squirm at the assumed superiority of the cynic. The
moralizing is a cake of soap.
Shakespeare is not depressing and Homer is not depressing. They
do not blink the facts of life, and beyond the humor and humanity
which saves them and their audience, they lose themselves in their
story. The evil they depict is true evil, so recognized, in their art-
world. It is, besides, evil called for by their story, not lugged in for a
moral or to exemplify a theory of art. They know that drab is not the
only color in life. They know that bright things are as real as black
things, but they are not illustrating a theory but giving us a story.
We pass with them into a fictitious world, and the things which
depress the denizens of that world do not depress us if we are not
brought back to reality by stumbling on a cake of real soap, not
integrated with the story.
The sight of his dog Argos made the heart of Odysseus sink. Even
for those who think ugliness the only reality, Argos was covered with
realities and squatted on reality. He depressed his master but he
does not depress us. He lies upon Main Street and has a Polyanna
wag to his tail. His optimism and his pessimism are, however, not
tacked on. “And lo, a hound raised up his head and pricked his ears,
Argos, the hound of Odysseus.... Despised he lay (his master being
afar) in the deep dung of mules and swine.... There lay the dog
Argos, full of vermin. Yet even now when he was aware of Odysseus
standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but
nearer to his master he had not the strength to draw. But Odysseus
looked aside and wiped a tear.” Argos is the ideal dog of a far away
master; “who has lost his dominion,” as Eumæus, the shepherd of
Odysseus, says. Argos registers the fate of his master. We feel, but
we do not feel depressed. It is human; it is all inevitable; it is real as
life but perfectly idealized by perfect transfer to the realm of art.
Eumæus gives us the morality of it, the truth of it, but he is far from
moralizing, either pessimistically or optimistically. Argos is the dog
Schneider that Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle could not find to recognize
him; he is the picture in brief of his master’s fate. Eumæus is as free
from all obtrusive soap as Argos himself. The dog’s fate is ascribed
to the careless women who “are no more inclined to honest service
when their masters have lost dominion, for Zeus takes away the half
of a man’s virtue when the day of slavery comes upon him.”
 V
ART AND THE DIVINE

1. RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF ART

The recent discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen has

aroused the interest of the world. The perseverance of the explorer,
the variety, artistic excellence and intrinsic value of the discovery
gave the news a place in the press and signalized the latest triumph
of the spade, which Schliemann converted into the best of
historians. Dig in your back-yard, and you can read its past in the
layers before your eyes. Make a cross-section of the country, and
successive deposits will tell you its story. Lay bare the strata of the
earth, and the buried fossils, the minerals, the gas, the oil, reveal
the history of the world. Grave-digging is the most productive
occupation to which science, art and even commerce can now be
vocationally guided.
What was it that enriched the Egyptian tomb and other tombs of
the past in which man was buried? It was religion, and specifically it
was belief in the immortality of the soul. The latest opened tomb
repeats the truth that was manifest in the pyramids of Egypt, which
were temples as well as tombs. The beehive tombs of Mycenæ from
which Schliemann actually shoveled gold ornaments of various kinds
were also temples as well as tombs. The altar-stones in Catholic
churches with their tiny loculi for the relic of a saint keep still the
memory of the days when persecuted Christians found the
Catacombs of the dead places of worship as well as of escape from
the persecutor.
The caves of Cro-Magnon and Aurignac and other ancient deposits
in France and Spain have disclosed the earliest evidence of man’s
art. The man was no mean artist, and the coloring and skillful
drawing have astonished every one. Why dark caverns, inaccessible
to light, should have been so decorated has puzzled observers.
Reinach calls the pictures early “magic,” painting of animals to
capture them. But there are paintings of men as well as of bisons
and reindeer. Professor Osborne is quoted as saying that it seems to
be art for art’s sake, namely, that the sheer pleasure of the drawing
is its reason. An admission, it would seem, that the professor has no
real explanation to offer. Sir Bertram Windle has recently asserted
the religious origin of these pictures. They would seem to be the
earliest appearance of stained-glass windows. The caves were
temples, and the explanation is confirmed by a comparison with the
beehive tombs of Mycenæ and with the Egyptian tombs. The altar,
the sacrifice, the victims, the food, clothing and other
accompaniments of life, are all evidences of religious feelings and a
belief in a continued existence. The absence of the bodies in these
caves may easily be accounted for. Fleeting time with prowling
animals has destroyed them while it left the pictures on the wall. Art
is even longer than Longfellow imagined.
If the earliest art so far found is religious in origin, these so called
Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian artists exemplify again what is a
commonplace in the history of art. It would be easy to add to the
following statements found under “Art” in Hasting’s Dictionary of
Religion: “The religious aspect of art in Egypt includes almost all that
is known of it.” “There is hardly any doubt that the high level of
Assyrian and Babylonian art is due to the deep religious feeling of
the two nations.” “The history of art in Greece is throughout its
course intimately connected with religion.” The fact is beyond all
denying. Religion and art are united, in music and song, from the
dances of savages to the Hebrew psalms and the stateliest liturgies;
in painting, from the early caveman to the modern man; in
sculpture, from the crudest icons dug up at Troy to the idol statues
of Greece and Rome, in the lions and bulls of buried Mycenæ and
Crete, of Assyria and Egypt, in the tiny seal rings, in the ornaments
and statuary of our modern churches; in oratory, from the prayers of
the priest in the Iliad, to the fulminations of the prophet and the
eloquence of the pulpit; even in civic oratory we find Demosthenes
and Cicero in their sublimest heights touching upon religious
motives; in the poetry of incantation, of oracle, of revelation, in
liturgy and drama; in the little tale of the fable and in the mighty
story of the epic, for the full sweep of which Homer and Virgil, Dante
and Milton must stage their events upon the background of a Divine
Providence; in architecture, from the tombs and temples of the
eastern world, to the temples of the Aztecs and to the Gothic
cathedral.
Aquinas gave in his Summa a synthesis of all science; Dante gave
in his Divina Comedia a synthesis of man’s life and destiny; the
Gothic cathedral of the same age gave a synthesis of all the arts in
one structure, exemplifying in fullness and excellence the mutual
interaction of art and religion in the middle ages, where manifestly
religion held sway as never before or since. The Morgan “Collection”
in the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York exhibits the
dusty wreckage of that wonderful union of religion and art. No poet’s
imagination is needed to rebuild those fragments into that marvelous
structure, under whose myriad statuary of serious saints and
grotesque gargoyles, you pass through carved portals into the
spacious aisles over which arches leap aspiringly. The painter
fascinates you with the story of many colors in the windows. The
weaver hangs other pictures on the rich tapestry curtaining the
walls. The wood-carver is everywhere evoking beauty with cunning
fingers. Music and song in the dramatic and antiphonal liturgy, the
sublime eloquence of the pulpit in turn charm and rest the ears.
The minutest detail is as artistic as the rich magnificence. The
missal on the altar will be a “Book of Kells,” a reflection on
illuminated parchment of the religious and monastic life which
produced it, by its patience, learning, devotion, silent application,
and scrupulous exactness; “examined with a microscope for hours,”
says an authority, “without detecting a false line or irregular
interlacement.” Near the missal of the Gothic cathedral would be
found a jeweled chalice, like that of Ardagh, with three hundred and
fifty-four distinct pieces, classic and rich in all kinds of ornament.
Baldwin Brown was surely right in declaring: “It is probable that
nothing more artistically beautiful has ever been seen than the
Gothic cathedral,” and the Gothic cathedral is the crowning glory of a
deeply religious age.
 VI
ART AND THE DIVINE

2. THE KINSHIP OF ART AND RELIGION

The history of art from its lowest manifestations to its highest

gives evidence of its union and intimacy with religion. The fact is
admitted, and might easily be confirmed by the very way in which
religious movements violently reacted against art. Hebraism knew
the power of art over its followers, and Hebraic antagonism to
sculpture and painting served to give religious impulse freer outlet in
Hebrew poetry and oratory and other literature. The Bible is the
supreme illustration of the influence of religion upon literary art.
Islamism opposed art, but gradually succumbed to its influence at
least in architecture. That Islam has not yielded more to art is an
evidence of arrested civilization, as well as of baser and more
sensual religious feelings. Puritanism, the intensest form of
Protestantism, opposed art in all its manifestations, but Puritanism
either diverted art energy to poetry and literature or provoked
excesses by its attempt to check the natural impulses of art, and
Puritanism finally yielded to art. It is clear then that religious
opposition to art serves but to show more strikingly the union of
religion and art. The religion that opposes art must direct the art
impulse into other channels or the religion degenerates. By their
nature religion and art are congenial.
What now is the explanation of this close and continuous union of
art and religion, found everywhere and in all ages? Taine and his
school, led astray by some details in the artist’s subject matter, have
tried to explain art by environment; but environment is an
explanation absurd in itself, and cannon be adequate for an
ubiquitous fact which transcends all environment. The theorists who
ascribe the origin of art to play and the deploying of superfluous
energies liken, with Herbert Spencer, the art impulse to the acts of a
kitten playing with a ball. Play may be partly an excess of energy,
but not all energy is artistic, and animal play is the stirring of
appetite, bearing but a slight, superficial resemblance to man’s early
strivings for artistic expression. How many games are imitative and
made more attractive by art! From the very first, mind enters into
early and even child art, and at the last the devotion of the artists to
their ideals in the higher manifestations of art, a devotion quite
unlike play, shows that the art impulse is essentially different from
the instinctive impulse of the kitten, which pounces on a rat as it
pounced on a ball of wool.[1]
Another school, striving to explain the connection between art and
religion, takes a directly opposite view to the play theory. Fear and
magic are, according to these authors, the controlling factors. The
difficulty in this theory is the utterly selfish element in the fear and
magic impulse, whereas the art impulse is disinterested and
unselfish. Besides, religious belief precedes the fear and magic
propitiation of offended powers. The voodoo and the hoodoo mark
degradations of religious impulses. Impulses in harmony with man’s
nature may go down as well as up, and even should we suppose
that the unselfish impulse of art, which finally becomes the evidence
and glory of man’s highest civilization, could be traced back to the
sordid details of selfish superstition, why should such an ugly
duckling evolve into a fair swan? Devolution and degradation are
easier than evolution. Why did the art impulse take the narrow,
upward path and shun the broad way down to perdition?
The perfection of the oak must have been in the potency of the
acorn. The oak could not come from a peanut, nor can all the
powers of sun, rain and soil or any other factor of the environment
evolve the fruit of the peanut vine into the majesty of the oak. We
can explain by an extrinsic cause the stunting of an oak or the
rotting of an oak, but we cannot account for the existence of the oak
—except by an acorn. We may find perhaps a thwarted or corrupted
art tendency in superstitious fear and its products, but that element
of fear could not write a poem or compose a sonata or rear a Gothic
cathedral. The perfection reached by the art product must have been
in the potency of the first artistic impulse in germ.
Religion and art were then united potentially in the original art
impulse just as the strength and lofty beauty of the oak were latent
in the acorn. The art impulse is natural to man; it is intellectual. It
requires brains to be artistic, as it requires brains to laugh, and no
animal has done either or will ever do either. The bird in building its
nest displays an intelligence not its own; its nest building is inherited
just as its song is. Jean Fabre’s observations have shown
conclusively the wonders of instinct, coupled with the stupidity of the
creature possessing the instinct. But the earliest scrawl or daub of
the child displays the mind working on matter and the deliberate
shaping of means to an end. All intellectual testers from Simon-Binet
to the latest have found the making or interpreting of pictures a
measure of intellectual power. They are right. Art is rationalized
pigments or sounds or words with their images or some other
rationalized material. Dr. James Harvey Robinson in Mind in the
Making says that we are wrong in rationalizing the past to make up
our minds, and how does he show it? By rationalizing another past
for us. The truth is we must rationalize the past, and Dr. Robinson
should induce us, not to stop rationalizing, but to rationalize
correctly and should give us something better than universal
skepticism with which to rationalize. The art tendency is one with
the religious tendency in being rational and intellectual.
Art and religion strive for high ideals; they are disinterested and
unselfish. LaFarge says to Saint Gaudens: “That work is not worthy
of you,” and Saint Gaudens picks up a hammer and smashes the
sculpture. That is an instance paralleling the heroic following of
religious ideals with like sacrifices. Was it fear of bogies or love of
their dead which filled so many tombs with precious articles?
Believing in immortality, Egyptians and Myceneans gave to the dead
what was most precious, and what was most precious was the finest
art in the costliest material. Love keeps graves green: fear erects a
crematory.
 Art and religion are personal and emotional. Each has its own
proper expression. Of religion the expression is worship and of art it
is concrete embodiment of the ideal, and in both cases the
expression is intimately personal and permeated with feeling. Art is
more sensible and so more emotional because its expression must
be presented to the senses or at least to the imagination. Religion
whose primary expression is an act of the will, need not of its nature
be attended with emotion or external display but it usually is, and
feeling and expression commonly help to the fuller expression of
religion. The rapture of art and the ecstasy of religion, though
differing in much, have also much in common.
In their social appeal art and religion are akin. The artist and the
saint have their hours of solitary contemplation. St. Peter at
Pentecost, describing the religious ecstasy of the inspired apostles,
cried out: “These are not drunk as you suppose,” and, continuing, he
quoted the prophet Joel: “Your young men shall see visions and your
old men shall dream dreams.” In the forming of their visions and
dreams saint and artist are alike, though the substance of their
visions differ. They are alike also in their impulse to give their visions
expression and to influence men with them. Religion is apostolic and
art is social, and that is why in history they have gone forth so often
hand in hand to subdue the world. Whole nations had to conspire to
erect the Egyptian pyramids, the tower of Babel, the temples of
Israel, of Rome, of Greece and of the Orient, and the Gothic
cathedrals. Only a union of art and religion could produce such
stupendous results. Patriotism and the state have at times come
near to these great effects, when patriotism or love of country
assumed the nature of religion. To produce these national
monuments a lasting cause as well as a cause of wide appeal was
necessary. Here again art and religion are akin. Art is long, and
religion is immortal.
Art reaches its highest and most perfect expression in the sublime.
Here religion does not walk hand in hand with art, but bears art on
high and gives to art some of its own divinity by endowing the
artistic expression with sublimity. The literature of the Bible attained
to heights which writers of other nations could not dream of nor
ambition. Genesis sets poets and all artists upon a lofty eminence.
By the revelation of creation, the imagination and the vision of the
artist became coterminous almost with that of the Creator. Newton’s
theory of gravitation which shepherded the starry hosts of the
universe into one obedient flock, gives us a realization of the effect
of Genesis upon the world’s imagination. The creation motif in
literature emancipating man’s imagination, enlarging the boundaries
of vision, and dowering the artist with sublimity, deserves a treatise
by itself and a history worthy of its greatness.
Art and religion are united in fact, so history teaches; art and
religion are akin, so the study of their attributes reveals. What then
is the only and full explanation of that fact and of that harmony?
Philosophers hold that the only and the full explanation of the
harmony subsisting between the mind and reality, which is called
truth, is found in the fact that both mind and reality are
reproductions in creation of God’s truthful knowledge of Himself.
Ethicists hold that the only and full explanation of the harmony
subsisting between the will and law, which is called moral good, is
found in the fact that both will and law are reproductions in the finite
of God’s love of Himself. So philosophers must hold that the full and
only explanation of the harmony subsisting between the soul and
art, which is called the expression of the beautiful, is found in the
fact that like the innate tendency to truth and good, the tendency to
beauty is a reproduction of God’s contemplation of Himself. Creation,
as has often been declared, is a manifestation of the art of God, a
mimetic presentation in finite matter and spirit of the infinite ideal.
All advance in truth and virtue is an approach to divine truth and
goodness, and all true progress in art is an approach to divine
beauty. “Filled with enthusiasm,” says De Wulf in L’Œuvre d’Art et la
Beauté, “before the greatness of the artist’s power, Dante Alighieri
compares it to that of Omnipotence:
 “‘Your art like the grand-child of God’

(Inferno, XI, 103).

“Art is the grand-child of God because it is the offspring of man’s

creative power as man himself has come from the hands of God.”
 VII
ART AND THE DIVINE

3. ART IN ITS RELATION TO VIRTUE

The fact that religion and art are connected is abundantly

established by history. The naturalness of that connection is made
clear by the many traits art and religion possess in common. As
philosophers have argued to the existence of God from the fact that
the universal belief in His existence can be accounted for
satisfactorily on no other supposition; as philosophers also argue to
the immortality of the soul from man’s universal and inevitable
tendency to unending existence, so in like manner, it may be argued
that since always and everywhere the art impulse is connected in its
origin and growth with religion, that impulse too, like belief in God
and desire of immortality and conscience for law and tendency to
truth, is a projection of the divine upon humanity, not the
anthropomorphism of God but the theomorphism of man. The
structure of our eye, made to respond to light, justifies us in
concluding there is light. The nature of the soul, which can respond
to infinite beauty, justifies us in concluding there is infinite beauty.
He who said, “Let there be light,” said also, “Let us make man after
our own image and likeness.”
An explanation of the nature of these two human acts of art and
religion will disclose more analogies while revealing essential
differences. Religion is a virtue of the will, a habit developed by the
free act of man, a virtue which culminates in worship of God as the
supreme being. The impulse of art has not been analyzed as fully
and as satisfactorily as the virtue of religion, but from Aristotle’s
analysis in the Poetics, through the Neo-Platonists and the
Scholastics down to Kant and his followers, there is common
agreement that the tendency to beauty does not belong to the
inclination towards good, actuating appetite and will, but that the
enjoyment of beauty is a function of the perceptions, the
imagination, and the mind. The admitted disinterestedness of the art
impulse is the paramount and irresistible evidence that it differs
essentially from the self-seeking tendency of will and appetite which
cannot be indifferent to good, since good is the very cause and
condition of the appetite’s existence. The enjoyment of a painted
fruit is akin to the enjoyment of verified theory or of a triumphant
conclusion, and not like the satisfaction felt in the ownership of the
painting of fruit or in the actual craving or eating of the fruit.
It is evident, therefore, why a man may be artistic without being
religious. There is no more difficulty in understanding why an artist
is not a saint than in knowing that conscience is one thing and
acting up to it another thing. Improvement in art does not always
mean improvement in morals or in religion, any more than to know
is to will. Nor, on the other hand, will the evil of an artist or of his
work be evidence against the divinity of art. The divine origin of
conscience and the natural law is evident in the vice of the sinner as
in the virtues of the saint. The essential difference between art and
religion shows also that the school in which the prophet is Ruskin,
the school which finds a religion in the beauty of world or of art, is
incorrect in its teaching. Love and fear are the mainsprings of action,
the incentives to virtue. Beauty may grace the attraction of good; it
cannot take the place of good in virtue and religion. Estheticism is
not asceticism. Francis of Assisi was a poet and a saint, Francesca da
Rimini enjoyed poetry, might have been a poet, but was not always
a saint, and many a Francisco and Francesca may be found neither
artistic nor religious, as many are talented without being virtuous
and virtuous without being talented.
Despite the sad lack of harmony between the beauty of their art
and the virtue of their lives, artists have nevertheless always been
revered. The honor of their art has won them in their lapses a
gentleness of treatment not accorded to less favored mortals. They
are fallen angels if they fall.
 Does the union of religion and art mean then that the artist must
be a moralist? To moralize is not a function of art as such. I enjoy
the beauty of a tree without any feeling that it conveys a truth or
inculcates a virtue. The artist may transfer the tree to canvas, where
I enjoy it as I did in nature without any accessory implication,
informing or ethical. Joyce Kilmer may put the tree in a poem and
with it add beauty to the truth that, “only God can make a tree.” The
psalmist may put a tree in his sacred hymn and with it add beauty to
his praise of the life of a good man, who shall be “like a tree planted
near the running waters.” Logical truth and moral good are not
excluded from art, although the artist by profession is not a teacher.
Modern critics are often inconsistent and hypocritical in welcoming
every dramatist or poet or novelist who undisguisedly advocates
various theories, but will be withering in their scorn for any one who
advocates the ten commandments. To moralize, to dogmatize, to
theorize is not the function of art, and though these actions are not
incompatible with the functions of art, very rarely in the history of
art has it been successful when it undertook to teach or to preach.
Didactic poetry, satire poetry and propaganda drama, have great
difficulty in becoming poetry and remaining poetry.
Religion then is a virtue of the will, resulting in acts of worship;
art, a power of the mind, resulting in various artistic creations.
Religion may remain wholly spiritual, even in its expression, but,
though the mind’s appreciation of beauty may rest on purely spiritual
and intellectual objects, such as theories or virtues or God and
heaven, art must express itself in sensible objects. Even in literature,
the most intellectual of arts, words and pictures of the imagination
are essential. Angels might be conceived as having an art whose
sole medium was spiritual ideas, not so man, whose mind works
through imagination. Aquinas, stressing the intellectual nature of
beauty, calls attention to the fact that while men speak of beautiful
sights and beautiful sounds, they will rarely and only figuratively
consider the acts of other senses, as taste, touch and scent,
beautiful. The actions of these senses are immersed in the material,
whereas sight and hearing are closer to the intellectual and spiritual.
Man has not yet succeeded in making a fine art whose medium
would be tastes and touches and fragrances. The unselfish
enjoyment of art cannot be released in objects so material and so
near to the appetites. The sensualist is not an artist in yielding to
sense enjoyment, although he may wish to give his unhallowed ways
an artistic gloss. The one who sees only an apple pie in rosy apples
or senses slumbrous ease in soft velvets and in iridescent silks or
perceives only the perfume in flower and fruit, is not experiencing
esthetic emotions, but rather stirrings of the bodily appetites. If
estheticism is not asceticism, neither is it, on the other hand,
concupiscence or mere sensualism.
Does the connection between art and religion exclude the
presentation of evil in art? Art would be much handicapped if it were
restricted entirely to good objects. Art is a manifestation of man’s
intellect and must act in accord with the nature of that faculty. If evil
is artistically presented, it must be depicted as evil. To present moral
evil as a good is a falsification as repugnant to the mind as would be
the painting of a blue sunrise, of a green moon or of a black-and-tan
sea, and as absurd as the sculpture of a five-legged lion. The
enlightened mind rejects such physical monstrosities, and the
enlightened mind, despite the lower appetites, rejects moral
disorders with equal, if not greater, repugnance.
Again, art requires that the evil, the moral ugliness or physical
ugliness, be a necessary and rational part of the presentation. A fact
of nature becomes at once the material of science, because science
concerns itself with unadorned truth. But for a fact of nature to be
material of art, it must be idealized, that is, it must be made an
integral part of the art product. The pleasure of art does not arise
from deception but from illusion which does not deceive. Painted
grapes might deceive birds; but did they deceive men, then the
effect would not be that of art but of reality. The evil or ugly can
never be pleasant as long as it is present and actual. The transfer of
evil to the world of art if it becomes an integral, justified and
rationalized part of the illusion, is usually enough to rob evil of its
actuality and unpleasantness.
 Sometimes in contemporary realism, with every justification of
ugliness from the art product, there is depression and not true art
pleasure, because we cannot forget the actual world when
contemplating the imaginary world of art. Suppose “Macbeth” or
“Œdipus” were really historical and were acted in the presence of
their contemporaries or of the next generation. Would there be
satisfaction and the emotional relief arising from illusion? Hardly.
Memories would be too much lacerated with the actual to surrender
to the illusion of art and to enjoy its contemplation. Actuality would
put back the salt into the tears that else might have been sweetened
by transfer of evil to remote and imaginary realms. The Greeks and
Shakespeare were right in making their tragedies historical, whereas
modern realists are somber with pessimism because they never
forsake the actual.
Art and religion are both concerned with life and so they both
must touch evil and ugliness, unhappily a large part of life. Religion
as a virtue must overcome evil and not permit it to master the will.
Art depicts evil in such a way as not to offend the enlightened mind,
by approval of evil or by the artistically unjustified introduction of
evil or by actual experience of evil. In all these cases the mind would
not experience the true and lasting pleasure of art. The taste of fruit
passes; the contemplation of painted fruit is a joy forever. Art
pleasure is not the playing with toys, as Plato would seem to make
it, but the fine occupation of rational minds, which Aristotle made it,
an occupation worthy of man because art interprets nature and man
to himself, because art exercises man’s rational faculties, because art
releases man’s emotions under conditions where the evil of actual
life is removed. Macbeth and Œdipus in life were saddening
spectacles; the echo of that sadness felt through dramatic
representation has high pleasure for the mind.
The cathartic function of art brings it close to the virtuous and the
divine. What virtue does really, art does ideally, transforming evil into
good. The vicarious sacrifice of Calvary was the catharsis of
mankind, an infinite cleansing, compared with which the vicarious
feeling of dramatically enacted evil is but as a drop to the ocean.
Close to the divine, too, although at the same time infinitely remote,
is the creation of art. Wisdom and love inspired God in His creation,
but so also did the quest of beauty. Aquinas called the universe
God’s sermon, and the universe is a divine picturing and sculpturing
and harmonizing. The artist follows far after, rethinking through
finite images the ideals which filled the thoughts of the Divine Artist.
In idealizing, in creating, is art akin to the divine, and, lastly, in its
disinterestedness is art divine. All appreciation of beauty is divine.
Contemplation will be the occupation of eternity, and contemplation
is the proper and the congenial attitude of the soul towards beauty.
Good inspires love and attracts to union, but when union has been
effected in eternity, the enraptured ecstasy of the beautiful will be
the soul’s unending activity. Beauty is the supreme excellence of
truth, the polish on the granite of fact, the uncloying fascination
arrested upon perfection. In eternity infinite good and infinite truth,
obscured in time, will stream into the soul unclouded and refulgent,
and beauty will grace love and crown wisdom.
The millions of mankind who admire the red of every morning,
and the forests breaking green through the silver mists and the birds
in awakened song rising from the flowers to the brightening sky,
these millions do not begrudge one another such beautiful
spectacles, nor are they mutually jealous as they listen to beautiful
sounds. That unselfish, that unenvious contemplation of beauty
marks off man from animals by an impassable chasm and makes him
an image of the self-sufficing Creator, the source of all beauty, the
exemplar of all beauty, whom the Blessed forever contemplate and
forever enjoy, unenvying and unenviously.
 VIII
THE VISCERAL TEST OF BEAUTY

“What is the prime requisite of a critic?” was the question. “His

sincerity,” said one; “his sympathy,” said a second; “his philosophy,”
said a third, “because everything he says will be ruled by his
principles, even his sincerity and sympathy.” The answer of the third
speaker is pertinent to a symposium printed in the New Republic on
the function of criticism.
It is the common view of the seven writers that criticism is an art
and the critics, artists, but no one, except Mr. Francis Hackett, tries
to show what the label of artist means. Mr. Dickinson Miller, a
professor in a theological seminary, very justly and quite fittingly
insists on the social responsibility of the artist, as one who deals with
life. Mr. Lovett goes to history and prepares the ground for a
discussion of principles by grouping critics in several classes. Mr.
Clive takes the humblest and most practical view of the critic, calling
him an appraiser, a function which Mr. H. L. Mencken vehemently
repudiates and places a chip on his shoulder while belligerently
proclaiming himself impressionistic. He makes one deep remark
which would seem to put him in the same school of esthetics with
Mr. Hackett. Presumably with humorous intent, or perhaps seriously,
Mr. Mencken locates the artistic impulse in “hormones and intestinal
flora.” Hormones are secretions of the glands (we just looked it up!)
and “intestinal flora” may mean ferments. Mr. Mencken is abreast of
the times. Graft on a new gland and masticate yeast, these are the
new specifics for all the ills that flesh is heir to.
The other contributors to this interesting symposium, though not,
with the exception of Mr. Hackett, delving as deep as Mr. Mencken,
would appear to be in philosophy individualists and subjectivists. The
former editor of the Athenæum, Mr. J. Middleton Murry, accepts the
dictum of Rémy de Gourmont: “Erect personal impressions into
laws,” as the “true motto of a critic.” Mr. Murry is, however, too
sensible to accord to individual impressions undue freedom and with
some violence to his consistency asserts that personal laws stand or
fall by their agreement with common experience and with human
nature.
Mr. Morris Cohen puts himself into a fallacious dilemma from
which he does not successfully extricate himself. According to Mr.
Cohen, all critics are led by personal impressions or by the authority
of others. He should know that between the blind feeling of
impressionism and the blind faith of authority there is enlightened
reason. Mr. Cohen does not take the path of reason, but endeavors
to escape the horns of his own dilemma by recourse to pragmatism.
He claims, what will be news to historians of philosophy, that Euclid
was the first pragmatist, although in the next breath Mr. Cohen
states that “mathematicians of the nineteenth century have shown
that Euclid’s axioms are mere guesses to be justified by their
consequences in the factual realm.” “Factual realm” seems to mean
the indefinitely remote future of pragmatism where the gold of truth
is separated from meaner elements. Some chosen spirits of the
“factual realm” now assure us that the “self-evident principles” of
Euclid are “guesses.” Mr. Cohen is equipped to write an inside history
of philosophy with some entirely original features. The “factual
realm” leads back to skepticism, and Mr. Cohen is still impaled by his
dilemma.
Mr. Francis Hackett makes the most serious attempt to get at the
philosophy of criticism and of art, and attacks at once the question
of the beautiful. It is evidence of his thoroughness that he goes
straightway to the great problem of esthetics, “Can an object be at
once beautiful and evil?” Mr. Hackett answers promptly in the
negative, but then proceeds to confuse the point by going to
another and different question, “Can evil or an ugly object be
represented in art?” The answer to this question is evident. The
elopement of Helen, the patricide and incest of Œdipus, the galleries
of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and countless other happenings in
the world of art, show that the evil and the ugly have been and may
be represented in art. “I can hardly conceive,” says Mr. Hackett, “an
artist as subduing a cancerous object to an esthetic design.” But why
not? Marriage with one’s mother is more repugnant than a cancer,
and yet it was handled successfully by Sophocles, however repulsive
some of his imitators have been in their details.
The very transfer to the realm of art robs the ugly object of its
actuality and imminence. Surely the ugly and evil have been and
may be represented in art, but such objects may not be represented
as beautiful and good. That were as false and untrue to nature as a
centipede cow in a picture. Perhaps a cancer could not appear in a
picture or poem or story except by suggestion. A stark realism would
disgust, but a true artist might subdue a cancerous object to artistic
design as effectively as Homer subdued in his story the fleas of the
dog, Argos, and the dung-heap where he lay.
Beauty in art would lose one of its charms, the splendor of
contrast, did not admitted ugliness or evil occur in art. Bad art
disgusts and so does badness in art, when badness is approved or
when it is projected into art for purposes not artistic. Mr. Hackett’s
real trouble is that he has not properly isolated the feeling of art
awakened by beauty. He thinks that the esthetic sense is sexual and
visceral. If the mouth waters at painted fruit, would Mr. Hackett call
art salival? Human beings are composites, and external objects while
producing their essential and proper effects may have concomitant
effects accidentally brought into being. To admire the beauty of an
apple is an esthetic feeling entirely distinct in cause and faculty and
in operation from the feeling of sensible satisfaction, anticipated or
actual, which comes to the taste-buds, and different again from any
visceral qualms that may arise from associated ideas of unhappy
experience with other apples.
Mr. Hackett has been led astray by not distinguishing the
disinterested emotions of beauty from the selfish emotions of
appetite. He calls beauty, “disinterested satisfaction,” and in that
word “disinterested” he has a fact about beauty, a fact solving his
problems, a fact which has been admitted by every one who has
studied the subject, and a fact which is capable of experimental
demonstration at any moment. Professor Phelps of Yale once called
esthetic emotions a spinal thrill; Mr. Mencken would call them
“hormones or intestinal flora”; and Mr. Hackett declares that “the
true sources of esthetic satisfaction and dissatisfaction are deep in
our emotional and visceral life.” The one essential quality of
disinterestedness, found in esthetic satisfaction, shows the absurdity
of all such statements. Bodily emotions are all the outcome of
appetites, and appetites are never disinterested but always self-
seeking by their very nature. They are actuated by good; they tend
to an end, an end which they do not and cannot seek disinterestedly.
Even the act of the highest disinterested love may be akin to the
sense of beauty, but it is not as wholly disinterested because that
unselfish love is still seeking good, and good as such does not come
within the purview of beauty at all. It is impossible to be
disinterested towards good or evil.
Mr. Hackett speaks of beauty being a “sensuous satisfaction.” Here
again there is a confusion between beauty of art and other beauty.
Art appeals to the senses because art presents its beauty in concrete
embodiments. To that extent the satisfaction of beauty arises from
sensible objects, but the feeling of beauty transcends mere
sensation. “Art is long.” “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The
satisfaction of appetite is passing; the satisfaction of beauty abides.
Mr. Hackett does well to seek the springs of beauty in personality.
Personality is an abiding principle of intellectual beings. The
enduring joy of beauty argues to an abiding principle which bears
the dynamic charge of that joy. Beauty supposes a soul.
“Beauty is a light that may follow any reality whatever and give us
the power to release our emotions happily in the presence of that
reality.” So states Mr. Hackett, and he is right, if he gives the correct
meaning to “emotions.” Light or luster has been recognized from all
time as an objective element of beauty, which has been defined as
the light of truth. Mr. Hackett paraphrases a definition which has
been incorrectly attributed to Plato. Kleutgen has defined beauty as
the perfection of anything resplendently manifested.
 Let us hope that Mr. Hackett will remove “visceral” from among
the qualities of beauty and preclude critics from adding a fiftieth
explanation of Aristotle’s catharsis to the forty-nine varieties already
set forth. Wearers of Murphy buttons or those who have lost or may
lose sections of the intestinal tract should be assured in an amended
edition of Mr. Hackett’s esthetics that their sense of beauty has not
been abbreviated or impaired. Sane philosophy is the prime requisite
of true criticism.
 PART SECOND
ART IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE
 IX
LOOKING FORWARD IN LITERATURE

The teacher of literature today is looking backward when he

should be looking forward. Greek literature, Latin literature and, to a
large extent, English literature are not orientated; they do not face
the rising sun. It was not so in the Greek schools of Greek literature.
Gorgias and Isocrates taught literature for the morrow, and for
practical and immediately practical purposes. In the Roman schools
it was so from first to last. Recall Cicero’s studies under Greek
rhetoricians and Cicero’s own preachment in the Archias speech.
“Shame on those who bury themselves so deep in literature that
they harvest nothing for the good of all and bring nothing to light for
our eyes to look upon.” Recall Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, and
all the intervening schools of Rome. Rome had no vocational schools
for road-building, but Rome did have schools of grammar, poetry,
rhetoric and philosophy where it trained leaders with vision and with
the power to act. The brains of Rome trained in literature guided
barbarian hands to lay down the roads over which Christianity
traveled and civilization came down to us.
Literature looked forward in every period of the world’s schooling.
Ausonius and Isidore, Alcuin and Petrarch, Boileau and Pope,
England and France, and even Germany until about the middle of
the nineteenth century and America until a little later, kept the
literatures of Greece and Rome orientated to the future by teaching
them as arts, by making composition of literature the goal of the
teaching of literature.
Science is ever growing old; history is always being rewritten;
literature is ever young. We know more about Homer’s history than
Longinus knew, but we do not taste the delight of his poetry any
better than Longinus tasted it. “Handing on the torch of learning” is
a trite phrase, but it is literally verified in the true teaching of
literature. Each age adds to the advance of science and information,
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